Facebook goes live with privacy revamp

Users of the social networking website can now designate content they post as being viewable to just friends, or friends of their friends, or everyone.

"We're adding something that many of you have asked for — the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload," Facebook chief exec Mark Zuckerberg explained in an open letter to Facebook users. "In addition, we'll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings."

Zuckerberg added that Facebook had expanded to 350 million users. The expansion has diluted the value of regional networks, some of which have millions of members, prompting Facebook to ditch the feature.

Users of the social networking utility will be asked to review and update their privacy settings. Plans to revamp the privacy settings began in July but the agreed upon changes were only rolled out this week. ®